Elevation of Privilege: Authorization Threats

Elevation of Privilege (EoP) threats involve attackers gaining higher privileges than authorized, potentially achieving complete system control. These threats are particularly dangerous because successful privilege escalation often enables all other attack types—an attacker with administrative privileges can spoof identities, tamper with data, repudiate actions, access any information, and cause denial of service at will.

Vertical privilege escalation involves gaining higher privileges within the same system or application. A regular user might exploit vulnerabilities to gain administrative access, a local system user could achieve root or SYSTEM privileges, or a read-only service account might gain write permissions. Each escalation expands the attacker's capabilities and potential damage.

Horizontal privilege escalation involves gaining access to other users' resources at the same privilege level. One customer accessing another's data, an employee viewing colleagues' personnel records, or a tenant accessing another tenant's cloud resources all represent horizontal escalation. While not gaining additional privileges per se, attackers access resources they shouldn't, potentially compromising multiple accounts or datasets.

Modern architectures face complex privilege escalation challenges. Microservices architectures multiply the number of privilege boundaries. Cloud IAM systems create intricate permission relationships. Container orchestration platforms introduce new privilege models. Serverless functions might inadvertently grant excessive permissions. Each architectural decision creates new privilege boundaries that must be identified and secured through threat modeling.